Lord Haw-Haw was a nickname applied to the Irish-American William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain from Germany during the Second World War. The broadcasts opened with "Germany calling, Germany calling", spoken in an affected upper-class English accent.

The same nickname was also applied to some other broadcasters of English language propaganda from Germany, but it is Joyce with whom the name is now overwhelmingly identified. There are various theories about its origin.

The English language propaganda radio programme Germany Calling was broadcast to audiences in the United Kingdom on the medium wave station Reichssender Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. The programme began on 18 September 1939 and continued until 30 April 1945, when the British Army overran Hamburg. The next scheduled broadcast was made by Horst Pinschewer (aka Geoffrey Perry), a German refugee serving in the British Army who announced the British takeover. Pinschewer was later responsible for the capture of William Joyce.[1]

Through such broadcasts, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda attempted to discourage and demoralise American, Australian, British, and Canadian troops, and the British population, to suppress the effectiveness of the Allied war effort through propaganda, and to motivate the Allies to agree to peace terms leaving the Nazi regime intact and in power. Among many techniques used, the Nazi broadcasts reported on the shooting down of Allied aircraft and the sinking of Allied ships, presenting discouraging reports of high losses and casualties among Allied forces. Although the broadcasts were well known to be Nazi propaganda, they frequently offered the only details available from behind enemy lines concerning the fate of friends and relatives who did not return from bombing raids over Germany. As a result, Allied troops and civilians frequently listened to Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts despite the sometimes infuriating content and frequent inaccuracies and exaggerations, in the hopes of learning clues about the fate of Allied troops and air crews.[2]Mass Observation interviews warned the Ministry of Information of this; consequently, more attention was given to the official reports of British military casualties.[3]

Radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express applied the phrase in describing a German broadcaster,[4] in an attempt to reduce his possible impact: "He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety".[5][6] In practice, the name probably came from the announcers using such verbiage as "So you English believe that you can defeat the superior German forces! Haw, Haw," a low-brow putdown obviously meant as a discouragement to the opposition. The "Haw, Haw" name reference was then applied to a number of different announcers and, even soon after Barrington coined the nickname, it was uncertain exactly which specific German broadcaster he was describing.[7] Some British media and listeners just used "Lord Haw-Haw" as a generic term to describe all English-language German broadcasters, although other nicknames, like "Sinister Sam", were occasionally used by the BBC to distinguish between obviously different speakers. Poor reception may have contributed to some listeners' difficulties in distinguishing between broadcasters.[8]

In reference to the nickname, American pro-Nazi broadcaster Fred W. Kaltenbach was given the moniker Lord Hee-Haw by the British media.[9] The Lord Hee-Haw name, however, was used for a time by The Daily Telegraph to refer to Lord Haw-Haw, generating some confusion between nicknames and broadcasters.[10]

Wolf Mittler was a German journalist. Mittler spoke near-flawless English, which he had learned from his mother, who had been born of German parents in Ireland. His persona was described by some listeners as similar to the fictional aristocrat Bertie Wooster.[11] Reportedly finding political matters distasteful, he was relieved to be replaced by Norman Baillie-Stewart, who stated that Mittler "sounded almost like a caricature of an Englishman".[12] It has been speculated that it was Mittler's voice which Barrington described; if so it would make him the original Lord Haw-Haw.[7] In 1943, Mittler was deemed suspect and arrested by the Gestapo, but he managed to escape to Switzerland.[13] After the war, he worked extensively for German radio and television.[14]

Norman Baillie-Stewart was a former officer of the Seaforth Highlanders who was cashiered for selling secrets to Nazi Germany. He worked as a broadcaster in Germany for a short time in 1939. He was jailed for five years by the British after the war. For a time he claimed that he was the original Lord Haw-Haw. He did have an upper-class accent, but he later decided that it was probably Mittler whose voice Barrington had heard. He may have been the broadcaster the BBC referred to as "Sinister Sam".[7]

Eduard Dietze, a Glasgow-born broadcaster of a mixed German-British-Hungarian family background,[15] is another possible, but less likely, candidate for the original Lord Haw-Haw.[8] He was one of the English-speaking announcers with an "upper-crust accent" who were heard on German radio in the early days of the war.[16]

James R. Clark was a young English broadcaster and a friend of William Joyce.[8] Clark and his pro-Nazi mother, Mrs. Dorothy Eckersley, were both tried for treason after the war.[17] Dorothy Eckersley was born Dorothy Stephen in 1893. She later married Edward Clark, a musician, and had a son, James Clark, who was born in 1923. She divorced her first husband and was married to Peter Eckersley, a senior figure working in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). After ten years of marriage to Peter Eckersley, Dorothy's increasing interest in German National Socialism and Fascism led her to move to Germany with her son, enrolling him (by then aged 17 years) in a German school. Following this move, "...Dorothy Eckersley came to play a key role in William Joyce's fate in Berlin..."[18]

William Joyce replaced Mittler in 1939. Joyce was American-born and raised in Ireland and as a teenager he was an informant to the British forces about the IRA members during the Irish War of Independence. He was also a senior member of the British Union of Fascists and fled England when tipped off about his planned internment on 26 August 1939. In February 1940, the BBC noted that the Lord Haw-Haw of the early war days (possibly Mittler) was now rarely heard on the air and had been replaced by a new spokesman. Joyce was the main German broadcaster in English for most of the war, and became a naturalised German citizen; he is usually regarded as Lord Haw-Haw, even though he was probably not the person to whom the term originally referred. He had a peculiar hybrid accent that was not of the conventional upper class variety. His distinctive nasal pronunciation of "Germany calling, Germany calling" may have been the result of a fight as a schoolboy that left him with a broken nose.[19]

Joyce, initially an anonymous broadcaster like the others, eventually revealed his real name to his listeners. The Germans actually capitalised on the fame of the Lord Haw-Haw nickname and came to announce him as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw".[7]

After Joyce took over, Mittler was paired with the American-born announcer Mildred Gillars in the Axis Sally programme and also broadcast to ANZAC forces in North Africa. Mittler survived the war and appeared on postwar German radio, and occasionally television, until his death. Baillie-Stewart was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Joyce was captured by British forces in northern Germany just as the war ended,[20] tried, and eventually hanged for treason on 3 January 1946. Joyce's defence team, appointed by the court, argued that, as an American citizen and naturalised German, Joyce could not be convicted of treason against the British Crown. However, the prosecution successfully argued that, since he had lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport and voted in Britain, Joyce owed allegiance to the king.

As J. A. Cole has written, "the British public would not have been surprised if, in that Flensburg wood, Haw-Haw had carried in his pocket a secret weapon capable of annihilating an armoured brigade". This mood was reflected in the wartime film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, in which Joyce's broadcasts are shown to predict actual disasters and defeats, thus seriously undermining British morale.

Other British subjects willingly made propaganda broadcasts, including Raymond Davies Hughes, who broadcast on the German Radio Metropole, and John Amery. P. G. Wodehouse was tricked into broadcasting, not propaganda, but rather his own satiric accounts of his capture by the Germans and civil internment as an enemy alien, by a German friend who assured him that the talks would be broadcast only to neutral United States. They were, however, relayed to the UK on a little-known channel. An MI5 investigation, conducted shortly after Wodehouse's release from Germany, but published only after his death, found no evidence of treachery.[21]

The propaganda cartoon Tokio Jokio (1943) has a scene with an anthropomorphic donkey (wearing a suit and a monocle in one eye) reading a radio broadcast. The sign on his desk reads "Lord Hee Haw, Chief Wind-Bag".

In the RKO feature, Passport to Destiny (1944), Gavin Muir plays Herr Joyce / Lord Haw, although he is constantly referred to as Lord Haw, rather than Lord Haw-Haw.

The novel Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut features an American character who produces similar propaganda radio broadcasts in support of Nazi Germany. A film, based on the novel, was also made.

The novel Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford features a satirical portrayal of British World War II radio broadcasting at the time of the Lord Haw-Haw broadcasts, explicitly referring to Lord Haw-Haw several times.

The title character of David Britton's controversial 1989 novel Lord Horror is based in large part upon Joyce.

In the British novel Mrs. Tim Carries On (1941), by D.E. Stevenson, the titular character, Hester Christie, makes multiple references to the "poisonous" effect of listening to "Haw Haw" on the wireless.

In the radio series On The Town with The League of Gentlemen (1997), local radio presenter of dubious morality Bernice Woodall plays an early recording of herself mimicking a broadcast by Lord Haw-Haw.

In Foyle's War, Series Four Episode 1, "Invasion", Susan's parents and farmer David Barrett are shown listening to Lord Haw-Haw, and Susan's father turns it off, with a derisive comment about the show. Barrett, angry because many acres of his farmland have been requisitioned to build an American military base, acknowledges that Lord Haw-Haw is a traitor but agrees with his comments about the Americans.

The Lord Snooty comics, featured in the British comic The Beano at the time of WWII, sometimes featured Lord Haw-Haw (his speech peppered with " haw haw") and his broadcast. He nearly always accidentally gives away the Nazis' plans in his propaganda, unwittingly helping Lord Snooty and his friends defuse the situation.

^Hall, J. W. (1954). "William Joyce". In Hodge, James H. Famous Trials. 4. Penguin Books. p. 80. Usually, the inventor of a popular nickname is unidentifiable, but the 'onlie begetter' of Lord Haw-Haw was undoubtedly Mr Jonah Barrington, then of the Daily Express…

^page 152 of Mary Kenny's biography on Lord Haw Haw "Germany Calling" (https://mary-kenny.com/books/germany-calling/) Furthermore [ref. page 192] "Dorothy Eckersley...a [Fascist] political radical... with her connections got William Joyce hired by German Radio". As for her son [ref. page 192] "...James Clark had a teenage enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler, and also worked at the Rundfunk as a newsreader..."

Doherty, M. A (2000). "Organisation of Nazi Wireless Propaganda". Nazi wireless propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British public opinion in the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN0-7486-1363-3.

Farndale, Nigel (2005). Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce. Macmillan ISBN0-333-98992-9